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Glad that they're safe and sound. It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over

Glad that they're safe and sound. It's worth pointing out that this is the first extremely public, widely acknowledged high risk mission NASA has done in over 50 years. The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. According to NASA's OIG, Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. There genuinely is a world where they don't make it back home. I am grateful that they did. And I'm grateful that we're going to go even further. I can't wait to see what Jared's cooking up (for those who don't know, he made his own version of the Gemini program in Polaris and funded it out of pocket).

philistine 6mo ago
I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.
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- Waterluvian 6mo ago
  Space flight safety is a function of culture and I don’t have any confidence that the culture has improved.
  - gerdesj 6mo ago
    I think we are a long way along from digging out Dr Feynman to look into why a shuttle exploded. Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation. When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast! The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things. I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
    - anonymars 6mo ago
      > I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past. I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they... I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
      - gerdesj 6mo ago
        There will always be issues on something a mad as putting some people on a firework and shooting them at a moving target 100,000 miles away from a moving platform. The heat shield failure was a test and the result was a working heat shield, when it counted. That's the point of tests. NASA already had several working heat shields from the old missions but the new one needed testing - for the shape of the craft etc. They already had a lot of data from the old efforts (that worked). I think that exit and re-entry are almost routine now, provided your rocket doesn't explode. The tricky bit is out there in space and trying to make the moon a resource of some sort.
        anonymars 6mo ago
        The new one failed in ways it was not designed to fail. In C-compiler terms it was "undefined behavior." In Donald Rumsfeld terms it was an "unknown unknown." The mere fact that the outcome was successful does not inherently indicate that the decision-making was safe: the O-rings "worked" for 24 missions and the foam/tiles "worked" for 111. Nevertheless there were ample warnings and close calls. Reentry from the Moon is not routine. Re-entry speed was about 40% faster than from low earth orbit, and kinetic energy goes up by the square, so about double.
- areoform 6mo ago
  That's physically not possible due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't. We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff. People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time. The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth. And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability. Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out. Shameless plug, wrote a bit about the Apollo hagiography, Artemis and risk here – https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri...
- marssaxman 6mo ago
  How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
- dingaling 6mo ago
  Artemis rides on extended versions of the same SRBs that made the Shuttle ascent so dangerous.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Was any shuttle lost to the SRBs?
    - abstractbeliefs 6mo ago
      Yes, 50% of shuttle losses were due to SRB failures (Challenger)
    - nominatronic 6mo ago
      That's exactly how Challenger was lost.
    - _moof 6mo ago
      Yes, Challenger - although program management knew they were violating a launch constraint (temperature), and it was the low temperature that produced the conditions necessary for SRB failure. As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.
    - dgfl 6mo ago
      Yes, challenger. The O-ring failed, creating a gas exhaust that almost instantly destroyed the main propellant tank.
      - dboreham 6mo ago
        I believe what it destroyed was the strut holding the booster to the tank. When the strut burned through the assembly came apart and aerodynamic forces did the remainder of the destruction.
  - stackghost 6mo ago
    The Artemis SRBs incorporate design changes to address the causes of the Challenger failure. Specifically they changed the joint design, added another o-ring, and they have electric joint heaters to keep the seals warm.
- fooker 6mo ago
  It’s statistically unsound to compare results of low probability events like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
  - philistine 6mo ago
    That's why I'm willing to bet on it, I'm not responsible for the development of NASA's vehicles.
pictureofabear 6mo ago
An error in any of the orbital math may have seen them flung out into space with no chance of recovery.
- gct 6mo ago
  Orbits do not work that way
  - ggm 6mo ago
    The craft has aerodynamics and speed. It might be figuratively true "unrecoverable" but if it takes e.g. 2 weeks to complete a return, their oxygen and food and batteries ran out. Alternatively if it enters too fast they return ... in pieces. I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.
    - 420official 6mo ago
      You seem to intentionally be ignoring the original quote that any error may have caused them to be flung into space. This is patently false unless the one math error is pumping in hundreds of pounds more propellant and burning far longer than the scheduled burns. NASA would need to make a significant series of mistakes beyond orbital math for the "flung out into space" statement to be true. They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.
      - dgfl 6mo ago
        This is underselling the risks. On top of the many trajectories which push them into unrecoverable situations, leaving them stranded in orbit, there can be trajectories where the moon gives a gravity assist strong enough to fling the spacecraft into escape velocity, fulfilling the OP. In fact, the trajectory they chose for this mission exploited the opposite effect to yield a free return without propellant expense. In the modern day, the chance of a math error being the root cause behind this failure mode are vanishingly small, but minor burn execution mistakes that do not require hundreds of extra pounds of propellant are definitely plausible. They were extremely common in the early days of spaceflight and plagued most of the very first moon exploration attempts. Again, with modern RCS this is unlikely. But reentry is still incredibly tight and dangerous. Apollo famously had a +-1° safe entry corridor, and Orion is way heavier and coming in even faster. If their perigee was off they could’ve easily burned up or doubled their mission time, which they may not have been able to survive.
irjustin 6mo ago
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die. That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?
- spullara 6mo ago
  overall construction in the US had a measured death rate of 1 in 1000 people in 2023. i think we can accept far higher rate for space travel.
- 627467 6mo ago
  > That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    A lot of advancement is multipurpose. CNCs are more accurate than machinists, computers are faster. And we have a lot of the technical knowledge written down.
    - 627467 6mo ago
      Machinist never stopped working even after advanced CNCs proliferated. Humans had records of how things were made and yet new generations had to relearn it - and fail in the process. This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space. Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
- atherton94027 6mo ago
  This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are
pramitdev 6mo ago
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roughly 6mo ago
Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.
- pdonis 6mo ago
  My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.
  - rvnx 6mo ago
    One way to see it: 1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example. 2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk. 3) It's a unique opportunity. (and potentially) 4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family. So you have a possibility of a guaranteed exciting life for a death that you anyway will have, but doing something you love, it's not too bad.
    - pdonis 6mo ago
      > It's a profession where you intentionally kill people Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
rkagerer 6mo ago
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. How did they arrive at that number? (Eg. Did they arbitrily establish the target at the outset? Or did it evolve by gauging the projected failure rate of their core mechanical etc. systems as those began to take shape, then establishing a universal minimum in line with that, to achieve some level of uniformity and avoid drastically under/over-engineering subsequent systems?)
conartist6 6mo ago
I mean it's the first space crew on an anti-science mission, right? The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life
normie3000 6mo ago
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. So with 4 crew members, chance of one dying was 13%! Very lucky they all survived.
- eks391 6mo ago
  That is not how statistical calculations of risk are made. If the crew has 1/30 crew mortality rate, and there were 30 crew members, that does not mean there is a 100% chance that one dies. While there is negligible chances that only a portion of the crew were to return, the outcomes are closer to black and white of nearly 29/30 full crew return and 1/30 no crew return.
big-chungus4 6mo ago
Glad that you are glad that they are safe and sound
themafia 6mo ago
> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition. NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission. > Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate. On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use. Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.
ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk. The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer. The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987. I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee. The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.
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Someone 6mo ago
> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like a 1:120 chance of a mortality of 4. I think that would make it an improvement over the space shuttle.
- Nifty3929 6mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that the chances that one dies in a mission is nearly the same as the chance that they all die. Very high correlation approaching 1.
  - Someone 6mo ago
    That’s precisely my point. The question is what a crew mortality rate of 1 in 30 means. If it means that, on average, a team member dies every 30 flights, with a crew of four, it’s likely there are fatalities in ‘only’ one in every 120 flights. For space shuttle, that number was about one in every 60 flights. So, with that interpretation, Artemis would be about twice as safe as the Space Shuttle. If, on the other hand, it means that, if you step aboard Artemis, your chance of dying during the flight is about one in 30, the Space Shuttle would be about twice as safe as Artemis.
simonebrunozzi 6mo ago
For context, Jared is NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. I didn't know, so I think it could be useful for others.
astura 6mo ago
>The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. The whole idea of the shuttle program was to make space travel routine and less-risky. Like air travel. It obviously failed at that goal.
johnbarron 6mo ago
Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction. Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets. "His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one. The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but. When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering. On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress... We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials
- NetMageSCW 6mo ago
  Almost everything you said is false, but to pick on a couple of issues, on Polaris Dawn he did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer that flew with him to test the spacesuits in space. That transparent review was enough to convince skeptical experts, journalists and the astronauts that the issues were understood and the work arounds adequate. I think your projection is the beam in your eye you are blinded by.
  - johnbarron 6mo ago
    "Almost everything you said is false" and yet you could not name one thing. If my claims were wrong, you would correct them. You did not, because you can't. You claim the Artemis II review convinced skeptical experts.What actually happened was Isaacman ( or shoud I say Jared? ) convened a January meeting to present NASA rationale for flying a heat shield they already knew was flawed. CNN was denied access, only two journalists were invited, largely off the record. Isaacman own words afterward, that the meeting "only reaffirmed my confidence", tell you the conclusion preceded the review and show a level of manipulative representation, that hint he will go far in the current administration. The most qualified skeptic in the room, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, heat shield research engineer, and member of the first shuttle crew to fly after Columbia, walked out unconvinced. He said NASA "definitely does not have the data to show that it's safe" and that the agency was using "the same flawed thinking and crude analysis tools, similar to Columbia, similar to Challenger." He wrote an open letter to Isaacman warning that this "exhibits the same patterns that preceded past catastrophes." He estimated 1-in-20 odds of disaster. Danny Olivas was a man on the payroll, Charlie Camarda no. On Polaris Dawn you say Isaacman, did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer. You are making my point for me. The spacesuit engineer was Sarah Gillis, a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX who spent 11 years training astronauts, including the NASA crews for Demo-2 and Crew-1. She was there because she helped build and develop what was being tested. Isaacman was there because he paid for the mission. Following test procedures that SpaceX engineers wrote, on hardware SpaceX engineers designed, inside a spacecraft SpaceX engineers built, does not make you an engineer. It makes you a test subject with a checkbook. A patient in a clinical drug trial also "does the same tests and reports results" as the researchers but that does not qualify them to run the FDA. Which brings us to the question you seem to have avoided. Why was Isaacman selected as NASA Administrator? He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which has a five year global payment processing deal with SpaceX's Starlink. He has no aerospace engineering background, no government management experience, no science credentials. During his confirmation hearing, when Senator Markey asked about his ties to Musk, Isaacman claimed they were not close :-)) and that he had not discussed his NASA plans with Musk... But when Markey asked whether Musk was present at his interview with Trump, a simple yes or no question... Isaacman refused to answer. A payments CEO with financial ties to SpaceX, nominated by a president who received hundreds of millions from Musk, who can't say whether Musk was in the room when he got the job... If you don't see the problem, you either are not looking or dont want to look.
HaZeust 6mo ago
Huh, COMPLETELY off-topic and bordering on weird, but I saw something on your profile that was eerily reminding to an idiosyncrasy I've personally possessed. I clicked your profile and saw the first line in your bio was a hexcode for salmon/persimmon color; my favorite color as well, and I used to religiously use it in much of my projects as #FF7256 - it's even my HN banner color. I was curious on what the color or its application means to you?
otikik 6mo ago
Who/What is "Jared"?

philistine 6mo ago

I’d bet a million dollars that Orion will win every safety metric compared to the shuttle once it is retired. NASA deluded itself in thinking the Shuttle was safe. The reality is that the Shuttle was the most dangerous spaceship anyone ever built.

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Waterluvian 6mo ago
Space flight safety is a function of culture and I don’t have any confidence that the culture has improved.
- gerdesj 6mo ago
  I think we are a long way along from digging out Dr Feynman to look into why a shuttle exploded. Unless you happen to have some deep links into NASA, in which case please elucidate us all, then why not celebrate a happy and safe return from a sodding dangerous mission that involved things like >25,000 mph relative velocity and some remarkable navigation. When you depart earth (close quarters gravity, air resistance, things in the way), everything moves really fast, really fast and any acceleration becomes an issue really ... fast! The moon moves, the earth moves: both famously in some sort of weird dance around each other and both orbit around the sun. Obviously the moon affects the earth way less than vice versa but it still complicates things. I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past.
  - anonymars 6mo ago
    > I think that NASA did a remarkable job of making Artemis II look almost routine and I don't think that was down to behaving as they did in the past. I have been excited for Artemis--yes it's big and expensive and late, but look how it has brought out the best of what humans can be--but, despite all that, the heat shield situation was textbook "normalization of deviance." Just as the O-rings were not designed to have any damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, just as there was not supposed to be any foam or tile damage but they retroactively justified it was okay, so too was the Artemis I heat shield not supposed to come back with damage, but they... I'm not trying to be negative, and risks are inevitable, but the resemblance to me was uncanny. The lesson with normalization of deviance is that a successful result does not inherently mean a safe decision. After all, most of the time that you play Russian Roulette you will escape unharmed.
    - gerdesj 6mo ago
      There will always be issues on something a mad as putting some people on a firework and shooting them at a moving target 100,000 miles away from a moving platform. The heat shield failure was a test and the result was a working heat shield, when it counted. That's the point of tests. NASA already had several working heat shields from the old missions but the new one needed testing - for the shape of the craft etc. They already had a lot of data from the old efforts (that worked). I think that exit and re-entry are almost routine now, provided your rocket doesn't explode. The tricky bit is out there in space and trying to make the moon a resource of some sort.
      - anonymars 6mo ago
        The new one failed in ways it was not designed to fail. In C-compiler terms it was "undefined behavior." In Donald Rumsfeld terms it was an "unknown unknown." The mere fact that the outcome was successful does not inherently indicate that the decision-making was safe: the O-rings "worked" for 24 missions and the foam/tiles "worked" for 111. Nevertheless there were ample warnings and close calls. Reentry from the Moon is not routine. Re-entry speed was about 40% faster than from low earth orbit, and kinetic energy goes up by the square, so about double.
areoform 6mo ago
That's physically not possible due to the distances and energies involved. Even with the Commercial Cargo and Crew Program (C3P), NASA has set the acceptable mortality threshold at 1 in 270 over the entire mission and 1 in 1000 on ascent / descent. If they could set it higher by gaming the math, they would. They can't. We're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. And no, Apollo wasn't much better either, at least 10 astronauts were killed in training or burned alive (8 NASA, 2 sister MIL programs), as well as (far worse, because astronauts sign up for the risk) one member of ground staff. People love to hate the Shuttle, and it ended up being subpar / fail expectations due to the political constraints NASA was under, but the Shuttle was a genuine advance for its time – a nonsensical, economically insane advance, but still an advance. If you look at the Shuttle alternative proposals / initial proposals as well as stuff like Dynasoar and Star Raker, you'll see NASA iterating through Starship style ideas. But those were rejected due to higher up front capital investment at the time. The Shuttle is an odd franken-turduckling, because it was designed for one mission and one mission only. And that mission never happened. That cargo bay existed to capture certain Soviet assets and deploy + task certain American space assets and then bring them back to Earth. And that's the bit that's hard to emphasize. The fact that the Shuttle could put a satellite up there, watch it fail, then go back up, grab it, bring it back, repair it, then launch again was an insane capability. Was the program a giant fuck up at the end? Yes. But does that mean Artemis will be safer than the Shuttle? No. That's not how the energetics, time from civilization, acceptable risk profiles etc. work out. Shameless plug, wrote a bit about the Apollo hagiography, Artemis and risk here – https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-risk https://1517.substack.com/p/1-in-30-artemis-greatness-and-ri...
marssaxman 6mo ago
How could a comparison between such dissimilar programs ever be meaningful? NASA flew 135 Shuttle missions over the course of 30 years; Orion will be doing well to approach a tenth of that number.
dingaling 6mo ago
Artemis rides on extended versions of the same SRBs that made the Shuttle ascent so dangerous.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Was any shuttle lost to the SRBs?
  - abstractbeliefs 6mo ago
    Yes, 50% of shuttle losses were due to SRB failures (Challenger)
  - nominatronic 6mo ago
    That's exactly how Challenger was lost.
  - _moof 6mo ago
    Yes, Challenger - although program management knew they were violating a launch constraint (temperature), and it was the low temperature that produced the conditions necessary for SRB failure. As with any aerospace mishap, it's a chain of events, not just one cause.
  - dgfl 6mo ago
    Yes, challenger. The O-ring failed, creating a gas exhaust that almost instantly destroyed the main propellant tank.
    - dboreham 6mo ago
      I believe what it destroyed was the strut holding the booster to the tank. When the strut burned through the assembly came apart and aerodynamic forces did the remainder of the destruction.
- stackghost 6mo ago
  The Artemis SRBs incorporate design changes to address the causes of the Challenger failure. Specifically they changed the joint design, added another o-ring, and they have electric joint heaters to keep the seals warm.
fooker 6mo ago
It’s statistically unsound to compare results of low probability events like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
- philistine 6mo ago
  That's why I'm willing to bet on it, I'm not responsible for the development of NASA's vehicles.

pictureofabear 6mo ago

An error in any of the orbital math may have seen them flung out into space with no chance of recovery.

gct 6mo ago
Orbits do not work that way
- ggm 6mo ago
  The craft has aerodynamics and speed. It might be figuratively true "unrecoverable" but if it takes e.g. 2 weeks to complete a return, their oxygen and food and batteries ran out. Alternatively if it enters too fast they return ... in pieces. I think you're being a pedant, if your point is a grazing entry causing rebound skip ultimately returns to some orbital path downward.
  - 420official 6mo ago
    You seem to intentionally be ignoring the original quote that any error may have caused them to be flung into space. This is patently false unless the one math error is pumping in hundreds of pounds more propellant and burning far longer than the scheduled burns. NASA would need to make a significant series of mistakes beyond orbital math for the "flung out into space" statement to be true. They certainly could've gotten the return wrong but with a perigee of 119 miles they arent even in a stable orbit and likely could deorbit themselves using only rcs thrusters at apogee, or by just waiting a few orbits.
    - dgfl 6mo ago
      This is underselling the risks. On top of the many trajectories which push them into unrecoverable situations, leaving them stranded in orbit, there can be trajectories where the moon gives a gravity assist strong enough to fling the spacecraft into escape velocity, fulfilling the OP. In fact, the trajectory they chose for this mission exploited the opposite effect to yield a free return without propellant expense. In the modern day, the chance of a math error being the root cause behind this failure mode are vanishingly small, but minor burn execution mistakes that do not require hundreds of extra pounds of propellant are definitely plausible. They were extremely common in the early days of spaceflight and plagued most of the very first moon exploration attempts. Again, with modern RCS this is unlikely. But reentry is still incredibly tight and dangerous. Apollo famously had a +-1° safe entry corridor, and Orion is way heavier and coming in even faster. If their perigee was off they could’ve easily burned up or doubled their mission time, which they may not have been able to survive.

irjustin 6mo ago

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. This seems insane to me. That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before. That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die. That's the starting point? That's what we document as acceptable?

spullara 6mo ago
overall construction in the US had a measured death rate of 1 in 1000 people in 2023. i think we can accept far higher rate for space travel.
627467 6mo ago
> That X decades later we accept, with all our advancements in tech, a weaker system than ever before how do you keep past performance while stop performing it for XY decades?
- HWR_14 6mo ago
  A lot of advancement is multipurpose. CNCs are more accurate than machinists, computers are faster. And we have a lot of the technical knowledge written down.
  - 627467 6mo ago
    Machinist never stopped working even after advanced CNCs proliferated. Humans had records of how things were made and yet new generations had to relearn it - and fail in the process. This mission is not about sending stuff out to deep space. Its about sending out new generation of humans to deep space. Even if you could guarantee that these new humans have exact same experience of past humans, can we guarantee that past decades simulations or theoretical knowledge acquired - while NOT actually doing something - will effectively reduce the chances of mortality?
atherton94027 6mo ago
This was the farthest humans ever travelled from earth, even farther than apollo 13. Intuitively the farther you go the higher the risks are

pramitdev 6mo ago

[flagged]

roughly 6mo ago

Astronauts are, as a group, extremely risk loving. Every single person who signs up to go into space knows what they’re signing up for - they’ve spent their entire life working for the opportunity to be put in a tin can and shot into orbit atop a million pounds of explosives. There’s a very valid critique that NASA has become far too risk averse - we owe it to the astronauts to give them the best possible chance to complete the mission and make it back safely, but every single person who signs up for a space mission wants to take that risk, and we don’t do anyone any favors by pretending that space can be safe, that accidents are avoidable, or that the astronauts themselves don’t know what they’re signing up for. A mission that fails should not be considered a failure unless it fails because we didn’t try hard enough.

pdonis 6mo ago
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn up on reentry, he'd have done it.
- rvnx 6mo ago
  One way to see it: 1) Eventually you will die, no matter what. It can be the most mundane thing. Slipping on a ketchup splatter can cause great damage for example. 2) It's a profession where you intentionally kill people, so, that changes the calculation for your own risk. 3) It's a unique opportunity. (and potentially) 4) Gives a sense of living / be in history books for his family. So you have a possibility of a guaranteed exciting life for a death that you anyway will have, but doing something you love, it's not too bad.
  - pdonis 6mo ago
    > It's a profession where you intentionally kill people Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.
- WalterBright 6mo ago

rkagerer 6mo ago

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. How did they arrive at that number? (Eg. Did they arbitrily establish the target at the outset? Or did it evolve by gauging the projected failure rate of their core mechanical etc. systems as those began to take shape, then establishing a universal minimum in line with that, to achieve some level of uniformity and avoid drastically under/over-engineering subsequent systems?)

conartist6 6mo ago

I mean it's the first space crew on an anti-science mission, right? The point of them being there isn't discovery, it's to try to discourage anyone who wants try to understand and protect the planet that we all rely on for life

normie3000 6mo ago

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. So with 4 crew members, chance of one dying was 13%! Very lucky they all survived.

eks391 6mo ago
That is not how statistical calculations of risk are made. If the crew has 1/30 crew mortality rate, and there were 30 crew members, that does not mean there is a 100% chance that one dies. While there is negligible chances that only a portion of the crew were to return, the outcomes are closer to black and white of nearly 29/30 full crew return and 1/30 no crew return.

big-chungus4 6mo ago

Glad that you are glad that they are safe and sound

themafia 6mo ago

> but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. They understood it to be extremely risky immediately. They understood the ice issue early on as evidenced by the fact that they completely changed the coating on the external fuel tank to try to compensate for it. They also added ice bridges and other features to the launch pad to try to diminish the risk. They also planned for in orbit heat shield tile repair. They specifically chose the glue to be compatible with total vacuum conditions so they could actually detach and rebond a whole tile if necessary. They developed a complicated and, unfortunately wrong, computer model to estimate the damage potential of ice strikes to the heat shield tiles. What they _finally_ came to understand was that you just have to swing the arm out on orbit and take high resolution pictures of the vehicle to properly assess it's condition. NASA was and always is very bad at calculating systemic risk. They have the right people developing risk profiles for individual components but they've never had the understanding at the management level of how to assess them as a complete vehicle in the context of any given mission. > Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle. The huge advantage they now have is a capable launch escape system which can possibly jettison them away from the rocket should any issues arise during ascent. That was the one thing the shuttle could not possibly integrate. On the other hand they could take a far larger crew to orbit and maintain them comfortably for several weeks during the mission. The "space bus" generated a healthy 21kW from it's fuel cells and created so much water that you had to periodically dump it overboard. This was a blessing for the ISS because you could bag up all that excess water and transfer it for long term use. Anyways.. as you can tell.. I just really loved the shuttle. It was a great vehicle that was ultimately too exceedingly tricky to manage safely.

ErroneousBosh 6mo ago

> The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. I think they did think of it as risky and acknowledge that it was risky, they just had a different tolerance for risk. The Artemis mission is "more difficult" - you're firing folk way out into space and hoping you hit a fairly narrow channel where they swing around the Moon back towards you, and not just keep going straight on out beyond any hope of rescue, or biff it in hard becoming a new lunar crater. You've got to carry a lot more fuel, and a lot more technology. You're going to have them up there in a much smaller space than the Shuttle for a lot longer. The Shuttle by contrast was kind of "proven technology" by the end of its life, and we really should have developed some new stuff off it. Columbia first flew in 1981 but "the keel was laid" as it were in 1975! Think about the massive shifts in technology between 1975 and 1981, and then maybe 1981 and 1987. I remember someone saying in 1981 that their new car had more computer power controlling the engine than took man to the Moon (the first time round!), and my late 90s car has more computer power than took man to the Moon in the instrument cluster. Your car is probably a lot newer, and has about as much computer power as NASA had on the ground for the Apollo missions just to operate the buttons on the steering wheel that turn the radio up and down, in a chip the size of your fingernail, that costs the price of a not very good coffee. The main failure modes of space travel have always been "we can't get the astronauts back down", "we can't get the astronauts back down at less than several times the speed of sound", or "the astronauts are now a rapidly expanding cloud of hot fried mince". What's changed is the extent to which we accept that, I guess.

deleted 6mo ago

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Someone 6mo ago

> Artemis acceptable crew mortality rate is 1 in 30. Roughly 3x riskier than the shuttle Do you have a link? I’m asking because it is very easy to make mistakes when comparing risks. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725961 translates that into “That if we send 30 people we _accept_ that one is possible to die.” If that interpretation is correct, given Artemis has a crew of four, that looks more like a 1:120 chance of a mortality of 4. I think that would make it an improvement over the space shuttle.

Nifty3929 6mo ago
I'm pretty sure that the chances that one dies in a mission is nearly the same as the chance that they all die. Very high correlation approaching 1.
- Someone 6mo ago
  That’s precisely my point. The question is what a crew mortality rate of 1 in 30 means. If it means that, on average, a team member dies every 30 flights, with a crew of four, it’s likely there are fatalities in ‘only’ one in every 120 flights. For space shuttle, that number was about one in every 60 flights. So, with that interpretation, Artemis would be about twice as safe as the Space Shuttle. If, on the other hand, it means that, if you step aboard Artemis, your chance of dying during the flight is about one in 30, the Space Shuttle would be about twice as safe as Artemis.

simonebrunozzi 6mo ago

For context, Jared is NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. I didn't know, so I think it could be useful for others.

astura 6mo ago

>The Shuttle was risky, but it wasn't thought of or acknowledged by NASA as being risky until very late in its lifecycle. The whole idea of the shuttle program was to make space travel routine and less-risky. Like air travel. It obviously failed at that goal.

johnbarron 6mo ago

Jared? Sounds familiar, is it a friend of yours? If yes should you not disclose it? The casual first name use basis is a tell. You wouldn't say "glad Bill is cooking something up" about Gates. This kind of parasocial familiarity with billionaires is how PR becomes indistinguishable from fan fiction. Isaacman is a space tourist, not an astronaut. He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which processes payments for SpaceX. Musk, who spent hundreds of millions on Trump's campaign, got him installed as NASA administrator. That's not meritocracy, it's transactional politics. If you or I had billions, we could also buy seats on rockets. "His own version of Gemini" is wild spin. Polaris was Isaacman paying SpaceX to fly him on SpaceX hardware. He had no engineering role, no mission design input. Calling it "his Gemini program" is like calling a chartered yacht trip "your naval program." Naming something after a historic NASA program doesn't make it one. The risk decision process was theater. Isaacman reportedly had already decided Artemis II would proceed, then invited Dr. Charlie Camarda and others to a "transparent review" that was anything but. When the conclusion is predetermined and dissenting experts are brought in for optics, that's not risk management, it's liability laundering. On the 1-in-30 mortality figure, framing astronauts making it home as something to be "grateful" for, rather than questioning why we're accepting odds 3x worse than the Shuttle (which killed 14 people), is a strange way to celebrate progress... We should be glad the crew is safe. We should also be honest that the person running NASA got there through financial entanglements with SpaceX, not aerospace credentials

NetMageSCW 6mo ago
Almost everything you said is false, but to pick on a couple of issues, on Polaris Dawn he did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer that flew with him to test the spacesuits in space. That transparent review was enough to convince skeptical experts, journalists and the astronauts that the issues were understood and the work arounds adequate. I think your projection is the beam in your eye you are blinded by.
- johnbarron 6mo ago
  "Almost everything you said is false" and yet you could not name one thing. If my claims were wrong, you would correct them. You did not, because you can't. You claim the Artemis II review convinced skeptical experts.What actually happened was Isaacman ( or shoud I say Jared? ) convened a January meeting to present NASA rationale for flying a heat shield they already knew was flawed. CNN was denied access, only two journalists were invited, largely off the record. Isaacman own words afterward, that the meeting "only reaffirmed my confidence", tell you the conclusion preceded the review and show a level of manipulative representation, that hint he will go far in the current administration. The most qualified skeptic in the room, Charlie Camarda, a former NASA astronaut, heat shield research engineer, and member of the first shuttle crew to fly after Columbia, walked out unconvinced. He said NASA "definitely does not have the data to show that it's safe" and that the agency was using "the same flawed thinking and crude analysis tools, similar to Columbia, similar to Challenger." He wrote an open letter to Isaacman warning that this "exhibits the same patterns that preceded past catastrophes." He estimated 1-in-20 odds of disaster. Danny Olivas was a man on the payroll, Charlie Camarda no. On Polaris Dawn you say Isaacman, did the same tests and reported results just like the spacesuit engineer. You are making my point for me. The spacesuit engineer was Sarah Gillis, a Lead Space Operations Engineer at SpaceX who spent 11 years training astronauts, including the NASA crews for Demo-2 and Crew-1. She was there because she helped build and develop what was being tested. Isaacman was there because he paid for the mission. Following test procedures that SpaceX engineers wrote, on hardware SpaceX engineers designed, inside a spacecraft SpaceX engineers built, does not make you an engineer. It makes you a test subject with a checkbook. A patient in a clinical drug trial also "does the same tests and reports results" as the researchers but that does not qualify them to run the FDA. Which brings us to the question you seem to have avoided. Why was Isaacman selected as NASA Administrator? He is the CEO of Shift4 Payments, which has a five year global payment processing deal with SpaceX's Starlink. He has no aerospace engineering background, no government management experience, no science credentials. During his confirmation hearing, when Senator Markey asked about his ties to Musk, Isaacman claimed they were not close :-)) and that he had not discussed his NASA plans with Musk... But when Markey asked whether Musk was present at his interview with Trump, a simple yes or no question... Isaacman refused to answer. A payments CEO with financial ties to SpaceX, nominated by a president who received hundreds of millions from Musk, who can't say whether Musk was in the room when he got the job... If you don't see the problem, you either are not looking or dont want to look.

HaZeust 6mo ago

Huh, COMPLETELY off-topic and bordering on weird, but I saw something on your profile that was eerily reminding to an idiosyncrasy I've personally possessed. I clicked your profile and saw the first line in your bio was a hexcode for salmon/persimmon color; my favorite color as well, and I used to religiously use it in much of my projects as #FF7256 - it's even my HN banner color. I was curious on what the color or its application means to you?

otikik 6mo ago

Who/What is "Jared"?